Problem Discovery (User Research, Ideation), Lo-fi and Hi-fi designs, User Testing. Collaborated with Product Managers (PM), Developers, Stakeholders to determine approach to tackling critical problems.
In recent years, there has been a significant increase in the number of claims associated with cardiovascular conditions. As a result, insurance companies (DA Care and our partner insurers) are experiencing a serious rise in claim costs, which is leading to a loss of revenue.
Problem Validation
“Let’s see how true and severe this is... how about checking our data?”. We dug into ‘tableau’...
Let’s roll the sleeves up...
Now we know there is a problem, and there are so many solutions too... but we don’t know why!!! and what the right solution is.
So why don’t we listen to real people and learn from them?
Design Process
We used ‘Double Diamond’ process to understand the problems and then to come up with solutions.
Research Plan
Target Users
Patients between 25-55, took medication/consultation for chronic conditions more than twice during last year.
User Interview Method
Semi-structured, in person and remote.
Recruitment
Online survey with some questions to understand their background, conditions, and willingness to participate for a user interview with an incentive. (Alchemer)
User Research
Research Goal
Decide the best ways to help pre-chronic patients to reverse or delay their condition and chronic patients to manage their condition.
Research Objectives
What measures they take to deal with their condition/s
Challenges and struggles they face because of their condition/s
How has the condition/s affected their day to day activities
What sort of a support they’d like to receive to manage their condition
Their awareness about reversing/managing the condition/s
User Interviews
We interviewed 7 people and talking to them opened the doors for us to see their struggles, challenges, their emotions towards the condition/s, their awareness and the biggest fears and their motivations to prevent or manage condition/s.
Some Research Insights
“
Started exercising but it’s hard to continue. I don’t think exercises changing anything.
“
My parents have those conditions... So I’m going to get it too, no matter what.
“
Medication draining all the family savings. I have kids and I have to support them.
“
I tried to take only healthy meals. It was very difficult. I felt like I’m having mood swings. I felt tired very quickly and I couldn’t even function fast enough.
“
I want to be there for my kids and I want to see they get married and having kids. But I'm afraid I won't be able to live that longer. I'm worrying about this every single day.
Fears about drug toxicity: They concern about taking medicines for a longer time period because of the potential side effects.
Lack of support: In remaining adherent with their medications, patients heavily relied on family members.
Forgetting to take medication: They always keep forgetting to take their medications.
Take their own measures: Try to skip medications intentionally, thinking they don’t need it when they are ‘feeling fine’ and use own self-management strategies and life style changes as a rationale for stopping their medicine.
Unavoidable: They think their condition/s were unavoidable even with medicine.
Blindly follow friends and family: Try to take advices from friends and family members and follow them, thinking what work for them will work for all.
Not checking progress: Some people tend to check their condition/s at home, but most of them don’t track the progress.
Key themes identified
Lack of awareness/education
Lack of motivation
High medication cost
Personas
We identified two personas based on the user research.
Name: Alex Age: 31 Marital status: Single Occupation: Sales Executive Health status: Pre-chronic
Bio
Alex is a tech-savvy person who loves to stay updated with the latest gadgets and technology. He is a hardworking and ambitious sales executive who is always looking to improve his performance at work.
Frustrations
Staying motivated to exercise.
Finding it hard to sticking to a healthy diet.
challenging to make lifestyle changes because of his busy schedule and the demands of his job.
Goals
Manage chronic conditions from developing in his body.
He wants to achieve this by adopting healthy habits such as regular exercise and healthy eating.
He also wants to stay updated on the latest research and medical treatments that can help him maintain his health.
Ultimately, he wants to live a long and healthy life without the burden of chronic illnesses or long-term medications.
Motivations
Make positive changes to his lifestyle to prevent the onset of chronic health conditions.
Name: Sarah Age: 42 Marital status: Married with 2 kids Occupation: Marketing Manager Health status: Chronic
Bio
Sarah has always been generally healthy but has a family history of diabetes and heart disease. She has noticed that her weight has been slowly creeping up over the years, and she is concerned about her high blood sugar levels.
Frustrations
Knows that she should exercise more, but she finds it hard to fit it into her schedule.
She works long hours and often eats meals on the go or grabs fast food and finding it hard to sticking to a healthy diet.
She also struggles with emotional eating and finds it hard to resist unhealthy foods when she is stressed or tired.
She’s worried about spending their savings on medication.
She always keeps forgetting her medication.
Goals
Sarah's primary goal is to lose weight and improve her diet.
She also wants to incorporate more physical activity into her daily routine and reduce her stress levels.
Motivations
She wants to manage her condition and reduce the medication cost.
Want’s to live longer to help her kids.
How Might We...
How might we effectively help pre-chronic patients to reverse or delay the onset of the chronic disease?
How might we help chronic patients to effectively manage their condition?
Ideation
How to solve these problem? What is our plan and strategy?
Before working on solutions, we thought of sharing the findings with stakeholders. So we organised a workshop involving the main stakeholders including head of product, CTO, product managers, engineering managers, marketing managers, business development heads and some designers.
Workshop objectives
Share research insights and user pain points
Get everyone onboard and create empathy
Coming up with potential solutions
Agree on a common strategy
Workshop outcomes and solutions
Introduce alternative methods to reduce amount of medicine intake i.e. physical activity, healthy diets
Encourage patients to constantly track their condition
Personalised instructions/tips for users to reverse, manage their conditions
Introduce easy to use tool with habit creations to help adapt to new routines
Increase education on the importance and consequences of medical adherence
Educate patients to highlight the long term consequences of each diseases
Increase the awareness to highlight that those conditions can be prevented, reversed, delayed or managed
The winner...
A Digital Diary or a Health Diary?
A tool for DA users to increase the awareness their health condition and encourage and effectively guid them to reverse, delay or manage the condition with and end goal of keeping them away from a cardio vascular decease.
Solution Hypothesis
Leverage DA’s telemed provider advantage with home-based services and offline clinics
Personalised coaching/ doctor, accompanied with convenient follow-ups/tests, medical actionable nudges, health report on correlation
Explain medication (what is it for / why take it, why side effects and mitigating measures)
Questionnaire to determine triggers that cause unhealthy habits
Sync with Apple Health/ Google/bp/glucose monitoring, take less than 3 min, fall in place with daily habits
Health score and setting goals, challenges, healthy badges to improve their health score and keep them on track
Incentives and variable rewards for completing challenges, to keep them motivated
Invite and challenge friends and family
Exposing a social feed
Key Objectives
Provide cost containment for insurers by preventing pre-chronic patients from becoming chronically ill, with a focus on the 3 highs diseases
DA’s strategy to increase revenue from chronic patients through the B2B route
Revenue generation from driving more users to Marketplace, CDMP programme, Mental wellness programme, Health screening, and Consultation
New User Acquisition
Marketing
+
Through B2B
26%
+
20%
=
46%
Competitor Analysis
DA's Competitive Advantage
Funnel: Analysing data from health screenings, data from insurer, in-app demographic data
Suite of services: GP, Specialist, Smoking Cessation, Dietitian, Mental Wellness, CDMP programs
Health screening and lab tests
Easier to target B2B: Target corporate users and insurance users are easier
DA Marketplace: To direct users to marketplace items related to them
Health Diary - MVP Features
After multiple rounds of ideations, brainstorming and competitor analysis, we identified a number of MVP features and prioritised based on MoSCoW Prioritisation method.
With the limited number of resources, moving MVP forward is a huge challenge. All the teams are busy with multiple things at the same time. So we phased it out...
Phase 1 goals
At the beginning, we will be asking users to input their health data manually in the app and they will be able to view it over a series of timeframe
Ability to key in their medications if the user is currently taking any and be notified / reminded to take medications on time
Generate health score with each data input from user and health score should be updated as and when new data is manually inputted by the user
Based on health score, guide users to take the next steps in maintaining or improving their health
Phase 2 goals
Eventually we will integrate with some devices so users will not have to manually key in their data
Ability to share patient data with the providers on the call so it creates a seamless experience
Ability to auto-refill / subscribe to medication based on prescription
Health Diary is Trending...
When are we get to see the designs?
After so many brainstorming, collaborations sessions and workshops, everyone’s excited to see the final designs.
So do we 😂
What was haunting us is, we knew we’ve just seen only the tip of the iceberg 🥶
User Flow
Everyone’s excited and overwhelming number of ideas popping up in our minds. We started to feel that we are right next to over complicate the solution.
PM started with the PRD and I started to frame it into a user flow and validated it with the engineering team.
High Level User Flow
“
Wanna get yourself dirty?
Let’s start sketching....
Visualising the Solution
There are a lot of ideas. We wanted to visualise those as fast as possible with the high demand from the stakeholders. Knowing that we’ll have to go on multiple rounds of iterations, we decided to go with the lowest fidelity possible, Sketching...
Finally...
Hi-Fis for Health Diary
After hours, days and weeks of sketching and brainstorming with PMs and Engineers, now it’s time to create the high fidelity designs.
Goals and Challenges
Challenges with rewards for completion to encourage users to achieve their goals
Dynamic Health Score
Dynamic health score based on their activities and health conditions
Charts
Charts to clearly visualise the progress of users health
Personalise Content
Personalise health tips and advices to improve your health condition and lifestyle
Medication Alarm
Reminders to take medications on time
Better Help
Help tips with visualisation to make it easier for users to understand and educate themselves
Some of the High Fidelity Designs
Our design principles here are simplicity, cleanses, and peacefulness. Converted those rough and sketchy low fidelities into simple, clean and peaceful interfaces.
Micro Animations and Interaction
We always try to make our users’ experience with us delightful. Micro animations and interactions play a major role in creating the surface delight.
When are we get to see the designs?
The question everyone asked. We conducted a sharing and prototype walkthrough session with all the stakeholders, Marketing team, Business development team, Support team and of course with the Engineering team.
At the end of the session, everyone was happy about our direction, what they have seen, and what we have came up with.
Marketing team (who owns the content) and the support team volunteered to help us to come up with content.
Everyone’s happy and we are happy too!!!
Yeah, we feel great. But how our users feel? We need a user testing?
The design is not for ourselves. So we wanted to check our designs with the potential real users. We are getting ready to see ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’
User Test Plan
Target Users
Patients between 25-55, took medication/consultation for prechronic conditions more than twice during last year.
User Testing Method
Remote moderated session (via Google Meet)
Recruitment
Online survey with some questions to understand their background, conditions, and willingness to participate for a user testing with an incentive. (Alchemer)
Objectives
Understand how potential users would use Health Diary
See how intuitive the designs are (see if our designs are simple enough to understand, easy enough to navigate, and visible enough to discover)
Identify possible usability issues
Some Research Insights
“
I felt like I’m in front of a doctor. Sharing my answers on an app is interesting to me.
“
I felt like i was playing a game, I want to get high scores...
the higher the score the healthier I am. That’s what I was thinking.
“
Excellent experience. Very intuitive. Easy and great design!
“
How do I edit my health data?
“
Oh... A lot of Info to read
“
Alarm label? What does it mean?
Users were not sure what the systolic / diastolic Blood Pressure means.
Users were not sure if the steps were linear on the onboarding flow.
Some users said if they get a bad score on the health diary, then it might come as a shock... but good to know a possible threat than not knowing it and liked how we are planing to guide them.
User assume the higher the score, the healthier they are.
Users are keen on getting more rewards.
Some Changes Based on User Testing Findings
Alarm label? What does it mean?
How to edit my health data?
Users were not sure what the systolic / diastolic Blood Pressure means
Users were not sure if the steps were linear on the onboarding flow.
Still WIP...
The next steps
Content strategy
Set up a permanent team to create regular personalised content for users
Bring Health Diary to maturity
Push Health Diary development forward while phasing it out
Device integration
Integrate Heal Diary with devices and wearables to make data entry easier for users and to improve the functionality
Constant improvements
Once launched monitor data and constant user research to keep improving Health Diary
Reflection
What we learnt from this whole initiative
Key takeaways
Set an overall goal for the discovery
Discoveries are messy and it could take as long as it takes if we don’t set clear discovery goals. One of the key learnings is, having a clear discovery goal and set of objectives to drive us there prevented us from running ina rabbit hole.
Recruitment
Recruiting the right candidates for discoveries is a key. But we learnt how hard and time consuming it is too. And we realised, we need to come up with multiple ways of user research as well a back up plan too.
Workshops, Brainstorming, and regular sharing
Discoveries are always a teamwork. We learnt how important it is to collaborate with cross functional teams through workshops, brainstorming, and regular sharing.
We generated so many great ideas, and the whole team realised how important the discoveries are to come up with the right solution.
End of the day, everyone felt like they were a part of this whole process and we all built ‘Health Diary’ together. Which is absolutely true... Health Diary is truly a teamwork.
